After the Death of Advertising, Shopper and Merchants Can Start Talking

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building
businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now
we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing
that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from
advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still
buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find
information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and
finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and
buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell
products.

I don't know that I'd go as far as saying it will not come back at
all, but merchants will find new, innovative ways to reach customers
without advertising when their budgets get tight.

Of course, we
might call these new things "advertising." I get that frequently
when I explain what Kynetx does. People call any message from a
merchant an advertisement even though, in many cases, it's not
widely broadcast.

There were plenty of discussions relevant to Dave's post at IIW this
week. The VRM crowd was there in force with grounded discussions
about how the implicit contract between merchant and shopper can be
rewritten in ways that are better for both.

Most exciting to me, the discussions about r-buttons
were getting down to the level where you could see real protocols and
standards developing behind the talk.

I was troubled by some VRM discussions that still see to border on
being hostile to merchants and even commercial efforts in general. I
think that only hurts the opportunity to have to redefine what
commerce is and how it takes place. I also think that some of the
discussion gets lost in relationships in general, not just those that
exist between the merchant and shopper. Nothing wrong with figuring
out infrastructure for relationships, but it's nice to keep things
focused on the task at hand.

The next steps we take can be as important as the final end state.
Dave's insight that the economic downturn opens up opportunity is a
good one. At Kynetx we're working on new ways for shoppers and
merchants to relate. We're creating new channels for relevant
messages--both from shopper to merchant and from merchant to
shopper. Not advertising--just plain old communication.